TASS - The Amateur Sky Survey

The Project:

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) is a loose confederation of amateur and professional
astronomers. Our goal is to build cameras which collect optical images
of the night sky, process the images into catalogs of stellar positions
and brightness, and analyze the resulting database.

We have already carried out a scan of the celestial equator with the
Mark III cameras and associated software; see our Home
Page or the article in "Publications
of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific", March
2000. Our current project is to build bigger, more sensitive
cameras (the Mark IV), and use them to study stars of magnitude 8 to 15
in selected areas of the sky.

Our Source Forge project contains software both to drive the electronics
of the camera units, and to reduce the images.

Quick Links

The TASS project's home page.
The site contains overviews of the project, photos, technical notes, papers
and links to the database and more software. This is a good starting
place for anyone new to TASS. Also see this page for instruction
for joining the TASS mail list.

Browse
the source code. This takes you to Source Forge's CVSweb.
This is usfull for a quick look but if you want to download any software
you will want to use either CVS or FTP.

General documentation
for using Source Forge, CVS and related information.

The Software:

The following software packages are either currently or soon will be hosted
on Source Forge. The software is divided into categories which are
listed in roughly the order in which data passes through our system.

Camera Control and Scheduling.

MK4d - Mark IV Driver

Purpose. Provides a high level interface to the Mk IV
camera system. The MK4d system is composed of a background or "daemon"
process that controls the Mk IV hardware. This daemon has no user
interface. This is provided by "client" programs over a local or
network connection. The Mk4d package contains a simple keyboard interface
as will as libraries for building clients in either C or TCL.

Purpose. This is a Linux device driver that may be loaded
into the Linux kernel.
The buffer card is a special purpose 8-bit ISA card that interfaces
the MK IV camera to a PC's ISA bus. This driver provides a simple
interface between the card and other user level software.

Data Reduction

Database

Database Analysis

Utility and Library

Purpose. This is a small library of functions for writing
messages log files or to the OS's Syslog facility. Using this library
a programmer can tag each message then at run time can call a function
to turn off or on logging of messages based on tag. MLog has binding
to both C and TCL.